Merging of Temporal Plans Supported by Plan Repairing

In this paper, we present an approach to coordinate two temporal plans, where one plan is for the achievement of a reactive goal, and thus has more priority, while the other is for the achievement of a proactive goal. As both plans have been computed independently from each other, conflicts can arise during their execution. We present a plan merging algorithm to coordinate the actions of both plans. Unlike many other plan merging approaches, which use only the actions present in both plans to coordinate them, our approach is supported by a sound plan repairing approach, to deal with the situations where both plans can not be merged as they are i.e. when one plan uses the same resource needed by the other plan and then does not release the resource. The plan repairing algorithm uses an extension of the well known planner Sapa, to repair a plan in the presence of another plan, and thus taking into account the constraints imposed by the latter. Our approach is generic and can be used in different situations of coordination between multiple agents and within a single agent.